Pearl Hacks

Pearls Hacks is a free event hosted at UNC-Chapel Hill. It is an all-female hackathon event that is amed at creating an encouraging and welcoming environment for women from all skill levels to pursue their interest in technology. Pearl Hacks is open to everyone and is an overnight event that took place from April 1st - 2nd, 2016. They host this event every year, and this year, I had the pleasure of being able to attend.

Even though Pearl Hacks is a “hackathon” event, there were other events other than hacking. Pearl Hacks offered tech talks from different technology companies around the triangle area. The people who host these talks are typically women in the technology field. Pearl Hacks also hosts different workshops ranging from beginner workshops teaching programming languages such as Python, Javascript, and HTML/CSS to more specialized workships on wearable technology, open source projects, and mobile development.

Overall, my experience at Pearl Hacks was great. I woke up early to sign in as a participant, and they served people breakfast. Registration was from 8am - 10am on Saturday so I had some time to relax since I arrived pretty early. After registration, there was an opening ceremony. The purpose of this ceremony was to introduce the participants to the different technology companies and get everyone excited about Pearl Hacks. I was surprised how many out-of-state people attended Pearl Hacks. There were people from New York, Florida, and Washington D.C. I was also surpised to learn this year was only the 3rd year that Pearl Hacks had been hosted. For some reason, I thought that Pearl Hacks started many years before since there were so many people there, but it has grown a lot in only three years. It was interesting to see how many technology companies came to sponsor Pearl Hacks. Some of these companies included Google, Cisco, Epic Games, and Capital One. After the opening ceremony, there was a sponsor fair where the participants could meet and talk to the representives from the different technology companies. There was also A LOT of free stuff which is always a plus. It was cool to get to talk to some of these representives and learn more about what types of things they do in the technology field. After the sponsor fair, I headed over to the beginner tutorial for mobile development using Android/Android Studio. I thought this workshop sounded very interesting. Unfortunately, the workshop was not very organized, and it ended being a lot of sitting around. The guy leading the workshop was a freshman in college so I don’t think he had a lot of experience with Pearl Hacks. Regardless, going to this workshop sparked my interest in mobile development. I have the program Android Studio downloaded on my computer so I plan on messing around with it and learning more about it when I have free time. After this workshop, I went to another workshop on open source projects. Since open source projects is one component of our cultural immersion and I wasn’t sure where to start, I thought this workshop would be very useful in helped me gain some more resources. During this workshop, we talked about Github and how to look for open source projects. The speaker also gave us other resources on how to find and contribute to open source projects. Outside of the requirement of this class, the speaker really motivated me to want to contribute to more open source projects. She talked about how having that knowledge can make you more hireable for employers, and overall, I think it would be a great experience to actually contribute to an open source project. Pearl Hacks was an overall great event, and it really motivated me to learn more about mobile development and open source projects. I definitely plan on going to Pearl Hacks again next year.